How I started to learn English

How I started to learn English

English has always been an interesting language for me, along with Japanese and Latin. The reason behind this is that, since I was a child, I play videogames, which at that time, were all in English. 

The first videogame I ever played was Super Mario 64 for the Nintendo 64 console when I was 2 years old. Of course I couldn't even read at that age, but at least exploring the massive worlds of the game helped me to develop many aspects of my brain and intelligence, such as hand-eye coordination, memory, deduction capacity, etc.

At the age of 4, I acquired the game I appreciate the most in my life and I think of it as the best videogame in history: The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. This was a beautiful open-world adventure game that required more thought than Mario 64 to advance, however, it also required something that Mario didn't: The ability to read and understand English.

I found myself many times stuck on the game because I didn't know what I had to do due to the fact that I couldn't understand what the characters were saying, although at the age of 7 I could read, but obviously, just Spanish. Thanks to this, I started to develop the desire and interest to learn English. Just the idea of learning a new language and understand what the game was telling to me was fascinating, so I started to learn by my own means, from the bottom.

As a kid, I didn't had access to Internet (I didn't even have a computer until the age of 12), and no one in my family knew English either, so I started to play the game with a dictionary by my side. Every time I didn't understand a word, I searched for it in the dictionary. I didn't care if I was advancing too slow through the game, I was happy to actually understand the English words little by little.

Thanks to my will to learn, my curiosity and my methods, I finished many games like Zelda. I got to the point that I started to feel like I was needing the dictionary less and less every time, because I was actually understanding almost everything the games were telling me by text.

I eventually acquired a computer with Internet and my learning of English boosted greatly. Nowadays almost every game has a multi-language option, but I honestly never play in Spanish, I always prefer to switch everything to English, so I can learn more and more that way. The same with online series: always with English subtitles instead of Spanish subtitles.

I say that learning English through videogames is a fascinating and fun experience, because you can see your learning progress reflected in the progress of the game. I'd also say that your willpower and your desire to know more is vital in the learning process of a foreign language.

-Franco González